Optimise your SEO without blowing your budget

1 Nov 2017

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5 tips for increasing your visibility online

Engaging with customers online in the digital era is key for any business to generate and grow revenue. But many companies of different sizes struggle with how to reach customers online. Surprisingly, the answer isn’t always about reaching customers, but rather helping customers reach you.

Do your research

Let’s start with the basics. You need to ask yourself what your potential customers are searching for online and using those terms in your website. Make sure these keywords are relevant to your customers – ask yourself, if I am a customer, am I realistically going to be searching for this term? Does it lead to competitor sites or unrelated sites? A good place to start when looking for keywords is to identify which terms your competitors are using and seeing if they are relevant to your company.

Get your tools

Speaking of research, it’s best to make sure you have access to tools that can help monitor and boost SEO. Moz is an effective tool for seeing what keywords your competitors are using. Google Keywords is excellent for finding out what terms your customers are searching, and using Google Trends is an asset for seeing what search terms are on the rise. Google Analytics is an important tool for keeping track of what pages are getting traffic, where that traffic is coming from and how visitors are moving through your site. This can all help in designing a fluid customer journey which can ultimately boost your ranking.

Optimise your meta content

Each of your webpages has a meta title and meta description that are seen when it appears in search engines. Think of this as a sign pointing to your website for customers, telling them what’s inside. It’s important to make sure your meta titles and description all fall within the appropriate character count, contain relevant keywords near the beginning, and clearly state what lies on the other side of the link. Meta data is often under-prioritised but are important for getting people to your homepage.

Character counts: No more than 70 characters for a meta title and no more than 160 characters for meta descriptions.

Optimise your site content

This might seem obvious as a concept – better, more relevant content means search engines are more likely to rank your site higher – but how do you ensure that your content is quality?

A good place to start is to forget about stuffing your content with keywords – Ever since Google’s Hummingbird update there has been a preference for relevant content that engages with the reader, rather than constantly repeating key phrases in order to rank for certain terms.

Clean up your website

There’s a checklist of important details that contribute overall to a site’s search ranking. Therefore, you want to make sure your website is optimised for users browsing on their smartphones by making your site ‘responsive’.

Think of the rest as spring cleaning: search engines crawling your site will rank it lower if there are broken links or duplicated content. It’s also a good idea to give all your images alt tags with keywords. They may be small changes but together they contribute to a better maintained and better ranked site.

Reduce your bounce rates

An important but overlooked influencer of a site’s ranking is the effect of visitors hitting the first page and immediately leaving. High bounce rates often result in poor rankings and can be reduced by ensuring that your site meets certain criteria.

The first thing you should do is check your site’s loading speed – higher loading times heighten the frequency of visitors bouncing from your site, especially on mobile. A simple trick for reducing loading times is optimising on-page images at their lowest size, or using less media like videos.

Another way to prevent users from bouncing is to keep your content clear, well maintained and relevant to the meta title and description as that’s what will pull a lot of users through to your site. In the end, little things can make a big difference in SEO.